Singapore - Day 7

Huh, What You Say?
There is a creole spoken here called Singlish, which is English, with a Chinese grammar and other Malay, Chinese and Indian words thrown in. People speak to me here with a rat-a-tat-tat of Singlish and I have absolutely no clue what they're saying. Funny thing is, you will catch an English word from time to time and feel like you know what is being said, but you are kidding yourself. So, for example in Singlish the phrase "I was asleep so I didn't get your call." looks something like this:

I sleeping mah, den never check phone lor.

It looks pretty easy written down, but when spoken it is almost unintelligible to outsiders. I went out with Puff and some of her girlfriends a few nights ago and just stared into space - they were chattering away and I didn't understand a word. Last night, when faced with another rendezvous with her friends, I asked Puffin's lil sis to serve as my translator. She sat next to me and gave me a blow by blow.

The Bao User Key
Bao are steamed buns with various fillings, some savory, some sweet. So, there are some with pork, some with barbecued pork, some with sweet bean paste, etc. What is cool is that there is a user key to indicate what kind of fillings are inside. It is composed of a variety of wrinkles and dots. So, if you look below, the bao in the foreground has no wrinkles but does have a dot, which means there is yellow bean paste inside. The one in the background is wrinkled with no dot, which indicates a pork filling. Other examples of the key are wrinkled with dot = barbecued pork and smooth without dot = red bean paste.

Sizing up the National Dish
There is some debate over whether chili crab or chicken rice is the Singaporean national dish. Depending upon whom you ask, you get one or the other as the answer. Be that as it may, I already had black pepper crab so I asked to try chicken rice. We went downtown to a place on Purvis street known to make a good version. Purvis street still maintains some of the old "shophouse" style architecture that predominated here in the past.

Chicken rice is chicken, served on top of rice. This seemingly simple dish is actually more complicated than it would appear. The whole chicken is boiled in a chicken bone stock with garlic and ginger and then is pluinged into an ice batch to give the skin a gelatinous finish. The rice itself is cooked in chicken stock to produce a tasty, aromatic offering. The whole chicken is chopped with a cleaver and presented on top of the rice.

We also had an order of Hei Tso, which are deep-fried prawn rolls.